Georg Acher acher@in.tum.de wrote:
On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 06:47:18PM +0200, Clemens Kirchgatterer wrote:
or better or whatever. cool, no problem. what? you signed a NDA that does not allow you distribute the os in the first place? your bad.
Once again, and now in capitals.
IT'S ONLY THE HDMI DRIVER. THE REST OF THE KERNEL IS GPL AND YOU CAN FIDDLE WITH IT AS YOU LIKE.
maybe i should just shut up and let you believe whatever you want and this is clearly my last mail to this thread. i guess others or even you are already bored to death by this topic anyway. but its summer slump, so who cares.
i tried to explain multiple times why a binary module is not compatible with the gpl and why it is not relevant in any way that one can recompile or upgrade the kernel "sacrificing a fundamental feature of the hardware (speak HDMI)".
maybe i'm just not capable to make myself clear and/or find the right words so let me quote mr. linus torvalds stating (many times) that binary kernel modules are "by default" a derived work of the kernel and thus must be licensed (at least additionally) under gpl:
[..] In the binary kernel module case, a bug in the code corrupts random data structures, or accesses kernel internals without holding the proper locks, or does a million other things wrong, because a kernel module is very intimately linked with the kernel.
A kernel module is not a separate work, and can in no way be seen as "part of the hardware". It's very much a part of the kernel. And the kernel developers require that such code be GPLd so that it can be fixed, or, if there's a valid argument that it's not a derived work and not GPLd, then the kernel developers who have to support the end result mess most definitely do need to know about the taint. [..]
so what is a "valid argument" that a module is NOT a "derived work"?
[..]
Similarly, historically there was a much stronger argument for things like AFS and some of the binary drivers (long forgotten now) for having been developed totally independently of Linux: they literally were developed before Linux even existed, by people who had zero knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that they clearly aren't derived.
In contrast, these days it would be hard to argue that a new driver or filesystem was developed without any thought of Linux. I think the NVidia people can probably reasonably honestly say that the code they ported had no Linux origin. But quite frankly, I'd be less inclined to believe that for some other projects out there.
Linus
best regards ... clemens